Cruz, Frank Eugene. ""In Between a Past and Future Town": Home, The Unhomely, and The Grapes of Wrath." Reprint. The Grapes of Wrath: A Re-Consideration, edited by Michael J. Meyer, Rodophi, vol. 1, 2009.

My dissertation, “Steinbeck’s America: Ideological Crisis and Popular Culture,” shows how John Steinbeck’s representations of the Dust Bowl during the 1930s grappled with various forms of U.S.-American ideological crisis (racial, political, economic, and ecological) and demonstrates how this Dust Bowl cultural formation has impacted the representation of crisis in contemporary popular culture. This study produces a new understanding of the unique position Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) occupies in the U.S. cultural imaginary and, in doing so, reclaims contemporary popular culture as a potential site of resistance and political possibility for the new millennium.